From ‘Warlords, the heart of conflict 1939 – 1945’ by Simon Berthon and Joanna Potts.
Page 20
In his diary, declassified in 2002, Guy Liddell, the wartime head of MI5’s B Division, admitted ‘There is no doubt that the Russians are better in the matter of espionage than any other country in the world.’ Evidence to support this came from the defection in January 1940 of Walter Krivitsky, the former head of Soviet Military Intelligence in Western Europe, who became the most significant defector yet from the elite of the Soviet intelligence services. Krivitsky gave tantalising clues pointing to a network of agents embedded deep in both the British government and the intelligence services. Though he did not know their identities, he was talking about the Cambridge Five, headed by the notorious trio of Burgess, Maclean and Philby.
Page 38
Stalin’s agents were also busy elsewhere. From its London headquarters the British security service, MI5, was collecting substantial evidence that the Communist Party of Great Britain was being ordered by Moscow to adopt a policy that was nothing short of treachery. ‘Moscow’s instructions’, noted Guy Liddell, the head of MI5’s counter-subversion unit, ‘are that the imperialist war must be gradually converted into a civil war, that no steps should be taken to oppose a German landing in this country since a short period under a Nazi regime would be the quickest way of bringing about a Communist revolution.’ Churchill was serious about intelligence and knew that Stalin was approving subversion in Britain, but he was not willing to jeopardise even the slightest prospect of an alliance with the Soviet leader by bearing down too heavily on Soviet espionage. He and his Cabinet continued to ‘abstain from any action which might suggest impatience, suspicion or irritation’.